Cheats-Area.com

   Not a month (or week, at times) goes by, without some big legal confrontation making the headlines in this gaming industry of ours. Inapt politicians pushing for unlawful laws, crazed lawyer(s) seeking to ban violent video games, patent holders suing half a dozen companies at a time, class action lawsuits being filed against greedy publishers, you name it. It almost feels like a great legislative curse is slowly taking over the entire industry... when, in fact, things weren't that diferent a couple of decades ago either. There may have been less publicity, sure, but nonetheless litigations have been a plague ever since the early days of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Breakout.

   Since I wasn't even born at that time (we're talking about the late '70s!), I had no idea about most of them. Until today, when I came upon a fine piece of editorial over on Gamasutra, titled "Litigations that Changed the Games Industry". The article highlights a few of the interesting game cases (or types of cases) and considers how these have affected the industry. "Readers may be surprised, but some of these cases produced real changes for the better", the author points out. And rightly so: sometimes, a bit of regulation is actually a good thing. Just like radiation. Or alcohol.

   But anyway, here are a few excerpts from the article, starting with Atari's Breakout case from almost 30 years ago:
"Atari attempted to register the copyright for Breakout with the United States Copyright Office and was denied. This began a struggle involving Atari, the Copyright Office, and U.S. courts that lasted more than 5 years. The Copyright Office resisted this registration because it stated that Breakout did not demonstrate the required artistic originality for registration.
In the end, the Copyright Office registered the game and with the support of previous court decisions, this helped pave the way for copyright protection for all modern games.
(...)
The game industry is now fighting for the additional respect that comes from First Amendment protection of artistic expression. (...) To date, the ESA has fought and won nine out of nine cases [attempting to limit the sale of games], having the state laws declared unconstitutional. Furthermore, the ESA has sought and won more than $1.5 million dollars in attorneys fees.
(...) The final group of cases to discuss are the newest type in this article. These cases have developed over the past few years and that will probably continue in coming years. These cases may be referred to collectively as "patent troll" cases.    Read on to see what they mean by "patent troll". In case you haven't figured it out already, there was a strong clue in last week's news about Nintendo getting sued over some shady patent.